New Delhi: Senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha on Monday cautioned his party by saying that “the more Narendra Modi speaks, the more controversy will be created” and the focus from major issue like corruption and mis-governance would shift to 2002 Gujarat riots.

"The Modi-baiters have a clear game plan. The more he speaks, the more controversy they will create. The pre-election political discourse will, thus, be distorted and attention will shift from the mis-governance and corruption of this government to what happened more than 11 years ago in Gujarat. We must bring the discourse back from the past to the present," Sinha said.

However, he was at pains to explain that he was not offering any advise to the Gujarat Chief Minister on how he should conduct the campaign.

Sinha's remarks come a day after Modi accused the Congress of hiding behind a “burqa of secularism” to escape from its failures.

Sinha said the focus of the debate in the run up to the elections should be on the bad economic situation and other problems confronting the common man for which the Congress government "is responsible" and not on "spurious" communalism versus secularism debate.

"We should bring the debate back to current issues which are basically economic issues. The issue of poverty, the issue of bread and the issue of unemployment… These are the issues which are hurting people. It is not communalism or secularism," Sinha said.

Terming the current debate on communalism and secularism as "sterile" and "useless", Sinha said he has written to the entire political class not to get into it as no one is benefiting from it and instead focus on the issues and problems of the people.